neomarxisme

Alito bit of pro-life in my life.
Alito bit of strict constructionism by my side.
Alito bit of activist conservatism is all I need.
Alito bit of Tina is what I see.
Alito bit of Sandra in the sun.
Alito bit of Mary all night long.
Alito bit of Jessica here I am.
Alito bit of you makes me your man.

After years of waiting, the truth about Shibuya is finally out! Mine eyes hath seen the light! Thanks be to God for the expert reporters at the Financial Times!

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Korean-Japanese teenybopper Sonim interview international heartthrob Orlando Bloom in English on a prime-time television show, and without hyperbole, I present for you the dialogue that transpired....

Sonin: Hi! ... I'm really nervous.
Orlando: (congenially) Don't be nervous.
Sonin: ...
Orlando: ...
Sonin: So, how are you?
Orlando: Good. I'm a little sleepy though. Jetlag.
Sonin: ...
Orlando: What time did you get up today?
Sonin: I got up at 6.
Orlando: ...
Sonin: ...
Orlando: ...
Sonin: So, I heard you have a dog.
Orlando: Yes.
Sonin: (pulls out picture of dog) This is my dog.
Orlando: Ah, it's a chihuahua.
Sonin: Yes.
Orlando: ...
Sonin: ...
Orlando: ...

I've had this blog for how long? - one year? - and I still haven't talked about my favorite Japanese tribute bands? W.T.F.? Here we go....

Slanted and Enchanted - Pavement 120%, lo-fi and sloppy to an exact T

Footloose - the best of Kenny Loggins by a guy that looks kind of like Kenny Loggins

KISS - Prince (early years)

Their Satantic Majesties Request - best of Rolling Stones' psychedelic period

Tristero - Pynchon

Take a Chance On Me - A*Teens

When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing 'Fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and if You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where to Land and if You Fall It Won't Matter, 'Cuz You'll Know That You're Right - Aimee Mann cover band

'N Utero - undetermined

Henry Rollins Band - Black Flag

Toto - USA for Africa (middle-late years)

Japan's public transportation system has come to symbolize everything right about Japanese society. Almost without exception, the trains come exactly on schedule, the stations are air-conditioned or heated depending on the season, and the seats are upholstered. There is little trash or vandalism or crime, and the main problems are those associated with overcrowding - chikan being the most prominent. I'm not saying I would go so far as to eat an abandoned cupcake found on a Japanese commuter train, but I would be happy to sit next to it. In New York, it would surely be mashed into the plastic seats by a guy with some sort of open wound.

We foreigners tend to give the Japanese a lot of points for the impeccable quality of public transport, but the motivations for excellence do not become clear until one experiences a system failure. Last week, the Den-en Toshi line stopped running around 10 a.m., and this morning, the widely-used JR Yamanote line ceased service for almost 5 hours. The result of these breakdowns is total and utter chaos. The city stops working, and stations are swarmed with masses desperate to receive small pieces of paper from train attendants proving their tardiness was caused by a mechanical problem and not personal transgression.

These events suggest that the precise scheduling is not a consumer-oriented "nicety" or dedication to "proper protocol," but an integral part of a mathematical solution to moving large numbers of people around the city in the peak hours of the morning. This morning's failure of the Yamanote line led to the stoppage of two or three other connecting lines. It's a delicate system, and Tokyo's population increases over the last fifty years due to both industrialization and post-industrialization have only put more pressure on exactness. In other words, there are too many users on the system, but since the current state of the Japanese economy needs this enormous amount of people coming into Tokyo every day, the only possible option is scientific accuracy in train arrivals.

These functional pressures may lead to a "culture of punctuality" but no matter how loose and surly train station employees become, the system can not handle even the smallest deviation. We consumers and train riders appreciate the image of order and hard-work, but maybe it's a bit much to prove a causal link between "culture" and train schedules: the trains in Japan move on time because they have to.

1. Who produced the first single "Heartbreaker" from Bape-sponsored Japanese hip hop supergroup, Teriyaki Boyz?

Daft Punk.

2. How did that happen?

Nigo made Daft Punk a special shoe.

3. Is "HeartBreaker" just rapping over a slowed down version of the Daft Punk song "Human After All"?

Yes.

4. Does the video include the four rappers dressed as the Fab Four, complete with mop tops and left-handed violin bass?

Yes.

5. Does the video include a Rolls Royce "macked out" in full Bape camouflage?

Yes.

Confucius famously said, "Man who farts in church sits in his own pew."

How prescient and extraordinary was Confucius that he:

1) predicted the rise of Christianity
2) understood this new religion's house of worship would take the form of Gothic architecture with seating by long benches
3) could come up with a scatological pun in Chinese that would work perfectly in a future Germanic language with heavy Romantic lexical borrowing

The Pew Research Center in the United States conducted 44,000 interviews in a massive survey of 44 countries to look at current trends in happiness - with a specific focus on gender differences. The United States and Canada took the top spots for "most happy," and Africa and Eastern Europe rounded out the bottom. Women were much happier than men overall, but Japan in particular had a significant difference between the men who considered themselves "on the highest rung on the ladder of life" (31%) and women asked the same question (46%).

Many other questions were asked, and the Japanese results are quite surprising. (I cannot vouch for the research methods or questions, but assuming that they are valid...):

1) Views of Birth Control - Despite lacking religious qualms about contraception, very few (38% of women, 26% of men) Japanese surveyed have favorable views about birth control, putting Japan in totally different league than the other countries featured.

2) Worries about Education - Only 17% of women worry about their kids' educations?! What happened to the "education mama"? For those brought up on the "classic" scholarly texts about Japan, the idea that education is no longer a main concern of Japanese parents is very interesting indeed. The relative easing of acceptance standards at the top notch schools backs up this trend - especially when viewed from the angle that Harvard and its ilk get more competitive each year. Yes, there are less kids, but the rigidity of the education-employment route has subsided in recent years. Becoming a bureaucrat still means going to Tokyo University, but less people see their future in the bureaucracy.

3) Hopes for the Future - Japan is dead last (besides Guatemala, perhaps). Only 15% of Japanese women and 22% of Japanese men think Japan will "get better." Maybe this serious pessimism has rubbed off on me. Did I learn this "terminal decline" neurosis from the Japanese?

Last night I attended the sold-out Cubismo Grafico 5-Kiiiiiii-Backdrop Bomb show at Shimokitazawa's Shelter, "sold-out" being a codeword for "way over-capacity and we're all going to die from either asphyxiation or a stampede when the crowd shifts position to get drinks after the first set ends." Most people were there to see the Backdrop Bomb who had some minorly big hits in the mid-90s and sound like a Japanese version of 311 who were called into a boardroom late one night and told to remove "all hooks" from their songs for an unknown reason. The whole Nick Hexum-SA Martinez two-vocal, reggae-rap-rock interplay took me back to the 90s, and in a sudden effort to graciously realize my otherwise nostalgic reification, the kids in the front started crowd-surfing - until some dude in Buddy Holly glasses and a pageboy cap came out from the back to "protect" the stage (whoever casted this revival tour is fantastic). I would have sworn the guy next to me was screaming "Primus Sucks" if I didn't actually understand Japanese. After the BDB set ended, the engineer put on Pavement (!) and I silently mouthed along.

The 'Bomb and CG5 can best be described as "towel rock," mostly because the swarm of fans all seem to be rocking out with a small towel around their necks to soak in the sweat. Now, I'm sure these towels have some direct connection to reggae, and by the constant sound of the video game "bomb" dropping sample, I know Jamaica's the source of insipration. But the towel lends an air of athletics to the proceedings, like if going to see a light-hearted punk band or reggae-rock act is no different than supporting your local soccer club. The kids jump up and down, get a work out, dry off with the towel, and then head over to the bar to get another draft beer in a paper cup. Towel rock naturally works best outdoors, or perhaps, on a futsal field.

In general, sports is a good way to think about rock music in Japan. Practice makes perfect! Please the fans! Determination! Team spirit! Hit the showers! Most gigs are like being inside a Gatorade commercial. I played basketball as a kid, but I've always seen art and music as a place where us uncoordinated types can go to flee an otherwise sports-obsessed culture. So for me at least, the sportsmanship in J-rock tends to suck out the craftsmanship.

Why was Kiiiiiii playing the set between two bands who provoke coordinated towel waving in the audience? I'm not particularly sure, but Kiiiiiii always seems to be playing for the other bands backstage, not the 20 year-olds in the audience. And you can't score goals like that!

I went down to Cow Books in Nakameguro on Saturday night, and browsed through some old Popeye magazines from the late 70s/early 80s. For as long as I've been coming to Japan, Popeye has mainly been a subdued street-fashion magazine, but it was the mag for "city boys" and urban culture back in the day. I've written before on their American college issue, and looking through other issues from that era, I was suprised about how relatively "masculine" the themes were. Instead of pansy dress-up and step-by-step fashion assembly, Popeye's editors tackled things such as rugby, American football, water sports, hockey, car racing, stereo equipment, and "cheap" travel. The general sphere of hobbies deviated very little from American influences, and I would guess that this continued up until the mid-1990s. 1981's Tanaka Yasuo novella Nantonaku, Crystal may suggest an ubersnobby consumerism was bubbling up, but these Popeye's remind us that guys were into "guy" things until very recently.

I also looked at a huge stack of old American and Canadian postcards, some of which had been actually sent from one person to another, before somehow ending up in Japan. All the handwriting from the 50s and 60s looks uniformly like my mother and grandmother's good penmanship, and I found a great one from the early 60s that read something like:

Dear Ruth, Here on the tour bus, there are only seven other girls named Ruth! Quite a name it was when we were born. Sincerely, Ruth.

I found a card sent from a father to his family who live(d) about five minutes from my house in Florida. Small world. There was also a "humorous postcard" featuring a horribly racist cartoon about a black couple that has (thankfully) long been out of production.

What's most striking about this collection is the relative insignificance of the tourist destinations pictures on the postcards: churches in the Midwest, a citrus tower in South Florida, nursing colleges, Dartmouth, small towns in Massachusettes, a shopping mall in Mississippi, St. Louis. We tend to forget that back when stepping aboard an airplane was "jetsetting," couples would happily vacation in middle Ameirca, and send postcards of the local shopping plaza back home. Look at us now, shooting digital photos of Gibraltar and Angkor Wat and zooming them across electronic channels to our loved ones back home. All our hi-tech info technology may be spiffy, but we aren't creating huge archives of physical objects. Fifty years from now, what will Cow Books 3000 sell in place of old postcards? Who will read my dispatches and laugh at my provincial travels?

Enter Radwimps - a J-Pop band who pledge to bring wimpiness to new radical heights.

What's "rad" about Radwimps? The sing-song Dragon Ash/Def Tech Japanese hip hop vocals.

What's "wimp" about Radwimps? The sentimental Mr. Children chorus melody and guitar wanking.

Why "Radwimp"? See the band's dictionary-based definitions (RAD is the "Royal Academy of Dancing").

How much more radwimp can Radwimp get? Seeing that they already sound like a post-bureaucraticized Orange Range, look out people.

Recently, the world's least musical superproducer Tsunku (of Sharan Q and Morning Musume fame) appeared on a talk show in the town hall of his native Osaka and stated that he is interested in putting together a "Morning Musuko" group comprised of 16-22 year old "goodlooking" boys. He did not make it sound like the audition and production process was already underway, and it's unclear whether this is anything more than idle banter. Because seriously pursuing a "Mo-Musuko" project is risking complete and utter civil war in the music industry.

For those who don't know, Johnny's Jimusho command a total monopoly over Japan's entire "good-looking boy idol group" market. The fact that they essentially have no rivals in this area is not coincidental. Television stations believe that they need Johnny's "talent" for their drama productions, and generally concede a large number of appearances on the weekly music television shows. Johnny will not let any of his acts appear on any television show also featuring musical acts who could be considered a male idols, and so, a program's use of competitors means automatically that Johnny's Jimusho walks. Too much weekly use of the other team, and Johnny's is happy to boycott a wider range of economic activities with your media conglomerate. They're sensitive guys with a huge potato sack of market power,and any possible rival would have to dislodge that 2,000 lb. rock from the infrastructure to even get started.

Most other management jimusho are smart enough to avoid such a conflict. But some get cocky, like Amuro Namie and Speed's company Rising Production (now Vision Factory), who attempted to break into Johnny's turf with Okinawan-staffed dance acts, Da Pump, w-inds, and Flame. How many times have these been on Terebi Asahi's Music Station total? Two times: just Da Pump twice in 1997. Johnny's Jimusho artist appearances from 1997 to 2004? 405.

Fuji TV's Hey Hey Hey is more complicated. Looking at the chart above, the original producer did not seem to be so keen on Johnny's acts from the start of the show. For whatever reason, JJ's boy groups were appearing on the show less and less (blue line) as the show progressed, just as the rival groups (the three Rising acts plus Doggie Bagg and co-producers Yoshimoto Kogyo's Run&Gun) started getting a moderate level of exposure. But a new producer came to the show in 2004, welcomed back Johnny's Jimusho and kissed the rivals all goodbye. Johnny's appearances in 2004? 18. Rival appearances in 2004? 0.

So, even if you're top management company Up Front Agency and have a chest full of medals from the Morning Musume offensive, it doesn't mean that winning the male idol war is actually possible. If Morning Musuko goes to market, either Up Front will get creamed and shut out of their usual television circuit, or perhaps, Johnny's reign of terror may begin to crack. I just hope they won't leave too much of the battle footage off TV.

* I will be DJing at the Kiiiiiii record release party at the Star Pines Cafe in Kichijoji on my birthday, November 30th - once with U.T. as MXUT and once by myself. I will most absolutely play your favorite song, so come on down.

* Work on my new album is basically delayed until January. I will most likely, however, be putting up a free mp3 "b-side" mini-album of alternate takes and deleted songs from the current project sometime early next year.

* Kobe-based artist Yamamoto Yoko, who designed the amazing "ashika" stuffed-animal for my debut album Kyoshu Nostalgia, has created some exciting new works based on that character, including the doll on the left and the pin on the right. Inside the plush doll is a music box that plays the final harpsichord melody to my song "Ashika Love" when you pull the string attached to the bird. These items and more can be ordered directly from Yoko on her homepage.

I'm sick and shouldn't be out.

Word's already out on the street and I've got a published review coming out later this week, so I don't want to go all apesh*t on Teriyaki Boyz' "Beef or Chicken," but before you all dismiss the group as a vanity project or an enormous commercial for a clothing brand, let us give big ups and mad props and one ups and Mad props to Nigo for shelling out the big buck$ for what could be considered a once-in-a-lifetime experiment answering that eternal question: what is the problem with Japanese hip hop?

I'm sure there's a minority out there who think Japanese hip hop is a near perfect art form, misunderstood by straight society and foreign nations alike. Everyone else can't help but notice something's off - whether they be Japanese purists buying imported 12"s at Manhattan Records or the African-American members of Mariah Carey's entourage laughing at Zeebra backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards Japan. Like many others who are sympathetic to Japanese music in general, I like the light-hearted, middle-class fare that only loosely resembles the American original - Scha Dara Parr, Rip Slyme, Halcali, M-Flo, Zen la Rock. The Teriyaki Boyz MCs all come from that lineage of "Party Rap" (Condry 1999!), which puts the Boyz in good shape from the opening dash.

For the last three months, Digiki's been harping in my ear that the beats are the problem! And I can't help but think he's right. So, look what Nigo does: brings in legitimately A-list hip hop producers from a wide spectrum of sub-genres. Problem solved! (And we get to see Daft Punk be even lazier producers than when working on their own album!)

On the input side, we've got the least aggrevating Japanese MCs plus the best world class beats money and co'nnects can buy. Output: Hit and miss. But since we've got so many hip hop styles, we can use this opportunity test to see what kind of backtracks work for Japanese rap:

1) Cornelius - he makes them sing like "the Jacksons" right around when Joe and the mom were getting divorced. This works.
2) Cut Chemist - Takagi Kan told me that the early Japanese rappers couldn't quite match Japanese with old-school rap, but this track seems to prove that the sing-songy, comical, 18-phone-calls-to-Brazil Kurtis Blow lyrical delivery style matches the dominant Japanese rap mode perfectly.
3) Neptunes - They're trying to front all tough and wealthy here. I don't buy it. Pharrell comes in and skoolz them. Pharrell.
4) Just Blaze - This shouldn't work but does. They're doing a parody of Ozawa Kenji on top of raw monotonous beats. Crosscultural miscommunication at its best.
5) DJ Premier - Sounds like 2 ft. High and Rising. Maybe 1.5 ft. But it works - as Jpop.
6) And so on...

But here's where everything comes into clear view: DJ Michael 5000 Watts screws and chops up the DJ Shadow track, and with the voices pitched down, the Teriyaki Boyz sound like "real" rappers! I'm convinced that the problem this whole time has been the relative high pitch and narrow range of Japanese male voices. I'm no expert on this matter, but I feel like the low timbre of African-American voices has become an implied aural clue towards "authenticity" in hip hop music, and sure, Eminem and his second cousin MC Paul Barman subvert this in their own Anglo ways, but if you're going to pose all thug, you need to the booming voice to match.

Practical Applications of this Research: just screw every Japanese hip hop track from now on, and we'll have the next international hip hop unit tearing up the American charts! Move over, TTC!

I've always wondered why Japanese homes do not have laundry dryers (乾燥機), and today I learned firsthand about the barriers preventing diffusion of these appliances: the unit is often larger than the doorframe. At least, that was true for the one my roommate ordered. The men in blue uniforms and yellow teeth came by to install this afternoon, but they ended up taking it back to HQ once they eyed the narrow opening to the washing room. Their company offers a smaller model fortunately, and perhaps we may still be able to say goodbye to dry clothes that are cold, stiff, and smell of big city pollution.

I remember very clearly the first time I heard a mashup. I was sitting at the computer at my old job back in New York and out of iTunes comes Skee-lo (impossibly) rapping over The Breeders' "Cannonball." Then came Dangermouse and the whole series of chromatically inspired spinoffs. Two years later, the cultural elite now find mashups laid up and played out - only the occasional Kanye West vs. Beach Boys novelty record whets the palate and wets the pants of the lurkers at boingboing.

Curiously, the mashup fad never caught on in Japan, even though Bonjour Records has been dutifully selling the illegal 2 Many DJs mix cds for years now. You'd think that a collector culture with such high literacy in nerdy musical software would embrace this new form of pseudo-creativity, but there's just not much going over here in this specific area of post-modern noodling.

There is, however, a small, growing scene interested in the production of "matchups" - musical creations that take the a capella track of a certain song and match it up with the instrumental version of the same song. This simple description makes matchups seem deceptively easy, but getting the EQ, levels, panning, and compression settings to sound exactly like the original is difficult, painstaking work (especially when the vocal a capella track and instrumentals are mastered separately.) The ultimate goal of the effort is perfect verisimilitude - not being able to tell the matchup from the official version.

Pursuing this obsessive technical competition takes a certain amount of insanity, but just playing audience to these works requires equal focus and dedication. Take this "matchup" of M.I.A.'s "Galang" by one DJ Ball-et - it sounds unbelievably similar to the album cut, with only some differences in "attack" and "release" on the compression to tip off the engineers in the room (and go right over my head.)

I can say without hyperbole that this is perhaps the least exciting trend I've encountered since the turn of the century, and I can't imagine it having any resonance outside of the closed audio engineering world. This is sub-sub-Sound and Recording: not even the eighteen year-old with triple pockets and a full Logic rig is going to take up the sport. The Internet seems like the perfect incubator for this kind of mathematical music culture, but a lot of the "matchup artists" have day jobs in the music industry and do not want to be found on websites promoting the downloads of "matchedup" top singles that sound exactly like the original. The outside world would be too quick to misunderstand this "art" for piracy.

Matchups are relatively new, so perhaps they'll go in more "creative" directions in the future. But as it stands now, this is orthopraxy in the extreme, joyless slavery to the conception of mechanical auras, a last stand against the ever-growing numbers of culture vultures who pick apart our culture so rudely and rebuild it to their own pathetic liking. No imagination in the Lego building, just following the pictures on the box.